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Life is full of disappointments. Trump again did not win the Peace Nobel, and appears visibly upset:
I am a bit surprised that Trump was surprised. If you told me that he would win next year's Nobel prize, my best guess would be that he had occupied Oslo and forced them to give him a Nobel at gunpoint.
So far, there have been two Norwegian lawmakers who have nominated Trump over the years, out of a parliament of 169. The parliament determines the Nobel committee, generally in proportion to their party strengths. Three of the five members will be replaced at the end of the year. There is no way in hell that the current parliament will vote in people who are receptive of Trump getting the Nobel for bombing Iran, and they will dominate the committee for six years, so even if some MAGA fans won the next election in a landslide, it seems very unlikely that Trump would get a Nobel before he croaks.
Even less likely is that Trump will do an 180 which will convince people that he deserves the Nobel. In his first term, he was not especially belligerent, but this time, he has taken actions which bar the Nobel unless he give some very costly signals renouncing his previous behavior. Which he obviously won't.
All of this is common knowledge. So the surprising thing about Trump is that he is actually surprised, that he had a world model in which he was more likely to win the Nobel than win Miss China.
Last year, the Nobel committee at least took Trump's feelings into account by awarding the prize to Machado, a democracy activist in Venezuela who was allied with Trump in fighting the Maduro government (and subsequently gifted her medal to Trump). Per WP, she is currently denied entry into Venezuela, seems the Rodríguez government has no interests in letting her in and Trump does not care either way as long as the US gets the oil. I am Jack's total lack of surprise.
This year, the picked laureate is a bit less reconciliatory towards Trump. Pillay seems like the antithesis to Trump. Not only is she a black woman, but she has made a career in international law. She was part of the International Criminal Court, whose members are currently under sanction from the Trump administration for going after Israeli politicians accused of war crimes. Later, she was a UN high commissioner for human rights and a member of the International Court of Justice before finally heading the Commission of Inquiry on Occupied Palestinian Territory which determined that Israel had indeed committed genocide during the Gaza war.
It the committee had wanted to pick a candidate to signal "fuck Donald Trump in particular", they could hardly have done better short of awarding it to Harris or the Ayatollah.
In a better world, Pillay would not be considered worthy of the Nobel. "Yes, she is part of the justice system which deals with terrible atrocities which have been committed in Rwanda or Myanmar, but that system is already universally supported by the civilized world. We would prefer to make a statement a bit spicier than 'war crimes bad' with our prize."
Instead, we live in times where everything Pillay stands for is under attack, where the theory of international relations endorsed by the most powerful country on earth can be summarized as "the strong will do what they wilt, the weak will suffer what they must". In this world, it makes total sense for the Nobel committee to throw their support behind international law.
Good for the Nobel committee for not aligning with either tribe. I do not understand what leads the left to defend Maduro and the right to attack the ICC. What problems did Trump's invasion create where ordinary Venezuelans' lives are or will be worse than if it hadn't happened? What is Piley doing wrong trying to prosecute Israeli war crimes?
I disagree: the Nobel peace prize should be about peace, as pure as possible, irrespective of anything else. If you can demonstrate your war is an effective means to a peaceful end, you may be good, you may honestly be the most effective altruist...but the prize should go to someone else who is more straightforwardly acting to reduce violence and suffering. It's a symbol that's particularly important to the simple-minded.
You really don't understand why the right would attack a court that believes it supersedes the sovereignty of the United States and would try members of the US military as war criminals? The Trump administration is correct to sanction and dismantle that court.
The ICC's clear violation of international law aside, it also makes sense politically.
The left would love to have a leftist body such as the ICC which can overrule the actions of a right wing President like Trump. Then they can say "we didn't violate the Constitution, it was out of our hands".
Are you also surprised that the left would attack the NRA?
What US members have been tried, what are their suspected crimes, and what did they actually do?
If they are guilty even by the US's own standards, only avoiding prosecution by inaction or corruption, they deserve it even by the US's own standards.
Otherwise regardless, they should be labeled by the ICC, without any US legal repercussions, so we can learn. If we don't seek input from those with different moral standards, we cannot improve or our own or stop them from decaying.
It appears the ICC cannot actually enforce over a nation (at least a powerful one like the US). The best they can do is get a world leader arrested if they travel outside...except they haven't managed that in the modern day, either. If they are effectively vocal, saying "we think you did something wrong", I don't think that deserves anything beyond a vocal response "I think you're wrong". Sanctioning a powerless ICC is at minimum a bad look.
Learn what? We already have processes for handling this. What additional value does an extrajudicial kangaroo court in Europe have in enforcing our laws. Perhaps we should start trying European politicians and soldiers in our own made up courts. Would that help them learn?
The ICC is not powerless. You are correct that they are de-facto powerless against the United States because we fight back against them. The answer is not to stop fighting back. It's to remove the threat entirely. You kill a tumor before it grows large enough to be a problem.
The Trump administration realizes quite correctly that the next Democrat regime could use the ICC to harass its domestic enemies while sidestepping Constitutional concerns. If there is a higher court that is above the Constitution and answers to no one, it's quite convenient. That's why they need to be defunded, disbanded, and sanctioned now.
It provides value when certain factions want is prohibited by your laws. You might have the right to free speech domestically, but if your political opponents gain power and decide that criticizing your political opponents is a hate crime, and
pack you off to a foreign countryextraordinarily render you to face foreign "justice", then that doesn't matter.It's the same kind of thing Charles I (and some king of Spain in the early 1800s) did by simply asking a foreign State to invade in return for economic promises. It's an act of civil war, obviously, but to what degree will the populace care?
One imagines a deal that the EU will keep the US dissident-free, while the US will keep the EU tariff-free into US markets.
This has kind of already happened; European countries (and US companies that would like to continue to do business in Europe, most notably payment processors) have already fought a few US companies for blasphemy (or "hate speech", as they prefer to call it). Which is kind of why the US needs to put its foot down and make sure that if the Europeans want their own firewall, they build it themselves (which would result in so much money -> political power changing hands that European gerontocracies would get turfed anyway).
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